About Team Drives

Team Drives are a type of organization space within Google Drive that
supports files owned by an organization rather than an individual user. A file may
be organized within a Team Drive or My Drive, but not both.

Access control

Team Drives use a similar permission model
as other content in Drive. Unlike files in My Drive, content
located within a Team Drive is owned by the team.

Permission propagation

Like items in My Drive, permissions on parent items propagate downward
to their children. However, within a Team Drive, permissions are strictly
expansive. For example, a user that has a role of commenter for a Team Drive
cannot have their access level reduced at another point within the folder
hierarchy. However, their access can be increased for a certain set of files.

Team Drive files must have exactly one parent. This means that Team Drive files
belong to a single Team Drive and are located in a single location within
that Team Drive. Having a single location simplifies permission rules for
Team Drive files.

Member vs. file access

There are two classes of permissions in Team Drives:

Member permissions are for users who have been granted access to the
Team Drive itself, either directly or through a group. Members can see the
Team Drive metadata, such as the Team Drive's name. Members have access to all
files within the Team Drive, with the access level depending on the role
given to the member (e.g. reader, writer).

File access permissions are for users who have been granted access to a
subset of the files in the Team Drive. For example, sharing a single file to
a user creates a file access permission.

An individual user may be a member of a Team Drive and have file access
permissions for files contained within the Team Drive. A file access
permission may be superseded if the user's membership in the Team Drive grants
them a greater level of access. These file permissions are revoked when the user
is no longer a member of the Team Drive, or their member access level is reduced.

Roles

As with items in My Drive, each user is granted access with a specific role.
An additional role, organizer, has been added for Team Drives. The
organizer role is required to to modify the location of files in a Team Drive
and remove content.

The owner role is not allowed in Team Drives.

See the permission model for additional
details about the capabilities of different roles in a Team Drive.